Moved to tears / Probing the mystery of art's emotional power

Steven Winn, Chronicle Arts and Culture Critic

Published
4:00 am PDT, Tuesday, June 11, 2002

It happened every night at the Geary Theater during the recent run of "For the Pleasure of Seeing Her Again." Someone will do it soon in front of "The Russian Bride's Attire" at the Palace of the Legion of Honor. Expect it at the symphony, the multiplex or at home with a book or television program.

Art makes people cry. They feel it welling up in their throats and stinging their eyes. They fight it or let it come, in trickles or welcome torrents. "To weep," said Shakespeare, "is to make less the depth of grief."

In our most fundamental and mystifying response to art, tears flow as reliably as millstreams. Crying in theaters, concert halls and museums may register our deepest personal feelings, transporting rapture or easiest access to sentimentality.

It can come on suddenly, when an aria floats into the ether or a movie soundtrack throbs. It can be predictable -- a familiar Vermeer portrait or Mary Oliver poem that works, like an onion, every time -- or utterly baffling. Crying can cleanse or startle, disquiet, abash or release unsuspected floods of feeling.

But why do we do it? What do tears tell us about ourselves and the art that produces it? How does crying figure in a rationalist 21st century, when computer art and human cloning are no longer the stuff of science fiction?

Considered one way, the inquiry is self-defeating. Crying, by its very nature, expresses nonverbal, inchoate emotion. "Crying is a puzzler," Charles Darwin said.

Researchers have theorized that crying is a private catharsis, a means of emotional communication or "an act whereby aggressive energy is dissipated in secretory behaviour" (pschoanalyst L. Borje Lofgren). No one really knows why we cry -- or why some people, including those leading seemingly balanced lives,

never do.

Teary responses to art might seem to be especially personal and therefore inexplicable. And yet certain things do induce crying consistently. The third act trio of "Der Rosenkavalier." The Rothko chapel in Houston. "Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood."

While the message is clearly important, the way art expresses and encodes what it's saying is what pulls the trigger. In film, for example, the medium itself may be particularly conducive to tears. The womblike darkness of a theater, dreamily enlarged faces and enveloping fusion of voice, music and story work in potent combination.

"I've embarrassed my children at the movies," says San Francisco Opera General Director Pamela Rosenberg. "I can cry so easily that I sometimes wonder about myself."

In a Minnesota study reported by William H. Frey in "Crying: The Mystery of Tears," films were analyzed for their ability to make subjects weep. "Prolonged sadness and many sad episodes" helped. So did seeing other people cry on screen. True stories, like "Brian's Song," were especially effective at producing audience moisture. Empathy matters.

Zegans believes that music often works as what behaviorist Konrad Lorenz calls a "super-releaser" of "locked-in feelings." Zegans uses Beethoven's late quartets as an example. "People talk about the transcendent experience of hearing them," he says. "What may be happening is that Beethoven is giving them a language for powerful feelings they sensed they had but hadn't been able to express. The reaction is: 'That's it. That's what I've been feeling. Someone else has felt that, too.' The tears are tears of recognition."

Rosenberg can summon peak musical performances that made her cry decades ago as if they had happened yesterday. Mahler's Ninth Symphony conducted by an aged Otto Klemperer in the 1960s was "saturated with endings. Everyone in that audience had tears and not because of sentimentality. If there was anyone who was not sentimental, it was Klemperer." A "distilled, mellow" Schumann Fourth Symphony conducted by Michael Gielen 20 years back brought tears of "perfect happiness."

Some pieces do it all on their own. "I don't think I've ever sat through Wotan's farewell to Brunnhilde" (in Wagner's 'Die Walkure')," Rosenberg says, "without losing it. Even a mediocre performance will set me off." "Rosenkavalier," she adds, pulls her tears "about half the time, depending on the performance."

For Cal Performances Director Robert Cole, "Rosenkavalier" works every time.

But other teary experiences have been very time- and place-specific. On Cole's first trip to Bayreuth, hearing "The Prize Song" (from "Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg") in Wagner's own theater carried him off. "The sound of it, just the sound in that theater, was so amazing," Cole recalls.

Context is a crucial component of any response to art. Historically, tears have gone in and out of fashion. In his fascinating "Pictures & Tears: A History of People Who Have Cried in Front of Paintings," Chicago art historian James Elkins writes that crying was big in ancient Greece, faded out in the Renaissance and resumed in late 17th century France.

Elkins and others regard our own era as relatively dry. "Overt weeping has become a rare phenomenon in our cool, post-modern audiences," writes Roger Gilbert in an essay on ovations. Elkins believes that knowing too much about a painting (or any artwork) can inhibit tears.

Context can also be cultural or gender-based. A self-described "Brit who was told never to cry," Philharmonia Baroque Music Director Nicholas McGegan resents the "tear pressure" he sometimes feels when "there's not supposed to be a dry eye in the house." Women, according to Frey, cry almost four times more on average (5.3 times per month) than men (1.4 times).

Surely the most immediate source of tears is personal, the complex of emotions, experience, knowledge and mood-of-the-moment anyone brings to art. Works that reduce one person to a puddle will leave the next one untouched. A string quartet that has a listener bawling one time might leave him dry-eyed and wondering what it all meant the next time he hears it.

Aesthetic merit may have little if anything to do with these triggered responses. Harry Parker, director of San Francisco's Fine Arts Museums, believes that the tears shed in front of Konstantin Makovsky's "The Russian Bride's Attire" (at the Legion of Honor) or William-Adolphe Bouguereau's "The Broken Pitcher" (in the De Young collection) often result from people "reading their own feelings of wedding and departure or an intuitive sense of loss" into those frankly sentimental paintings.

Film and television seem particularly effective at bypassing our customary discernment to produce a gush. Who hasn't been carried away by some sentimental scene or narrative, even while recognizing its shameless calculation? It may not necessarily follow, however, that certain tears are worthier than others. Different sorts of crying can send us different messages.

It's easy to dismiss some tears, in ourselves as well as others, as the byproduct of meaningless or shallow manipulation. But crying, even in response to a tearjerking movie or smarmy AT&T commercial, may offer insights into our natures that get walled off by ironic detachment and analytical distance.

"Why," New Yorker dance critic Joan Acocella wondered recently about two dancers zigzagging down the stage in a Mark Morris piece, "did I feel as though I were going to burst into tears?" Acocella went on to propose a formalist answer while also acknowledging the primal clutch of her feelings.

Crying is complex, a declarative action of the body rooted in the subterranean movements of our hearts and minds engaged by art. Carey Perloff, artistic director of the American Conservatory Theater, thinks people cry less at moments of deepest grief in a work of art than they do when the feeling starts to lift and an emotional release is permitted.

"Tears are a forward-moving experience," she says. "They come out of an imbalance that's part of the healing process." Even after breaking it down in rehearsal dozens of times, Perloff wept every time she witnessed the heartbreakingly hopeful waltz at the end of Tom Stoppard's "Arcadia."

Imbalance may be the deep wellspring of the tears art taps. There's a kind of doubleness in the pieces, performances and images that make us cry, an apprehension of something vast and insoluble yoked to art's sublime order and unearthly beauty.

It often comes in moments of disarming simplicity, when that doubleness stands in high relief. Parker speaks of a tiny Seurat study of the Eiffel Tower and a Durer rabbit, "so delicate and refined you just look at it and cry. " The murmurous, plain melody of "Verdi prati," in Handel's "Alcina," gets McGegan going.

Bach's "short and simple" motet BWV 118 is a new discovery for Cole. He programmed it during last week's Berkeley Festival and Exhibition of early music, eager to share his new find of something centuries old.

Perhaps some listeners cried at Saturday's concert in Berkeley's First Congregational Church. Of those, a few may need to hear the piece again and again, as Cole has, marveling gratefully at the power it holds for them.

Tell us when you cry

Tears at concerts, the movies, a museum or in front of the TV are both universal and unique. We want to hear what makes you cry and what you make of it. Be as specific as possible. Datebook will print a selection of your responses. Please E-mail us at datebook@sfchronicle.com sfchronicle.com. Or write: Letters to Datebook, San Francisco Chronicle, 901 Mission St., San Francisco, CA 94103. Letters should include city or town of residence as well as a contact number for verification purposes.